Farmers Ruined by PFAS Face Key Moment in Fight Against Pentagon

Neither Art nor Renee Schaap could bear to stay on their dairy farm in Curry County, New Mexico, in April 2022 as employees put down the last of their cattle, shooting 1,000 in the head one by one with .22 caliber bullets.

Workers dumped the carcasses into a 20-foot-deep trench the length of a football field, creating two layers of rotting corpses that emanated a “smell of death,” Renee said. The soil is riddled with the toxins that killed them.

The herd — once numbering 3,600 — had slowly been dying for years after drinking water contaminated by per- or polyfluoroalkyl ...